Peace in Our Time
The 1936 Berlin Olympics posed an agonizing dilemma for those who believed that there was no evil worse than war.
Photo: Popperfoto
The official closing this weekend of the most politically charged Olympic Games in recent memory evokes any number of historical antecedents, none more so than the Berlin Games of 1936.
One year before the Nazi state played host to the Summer Olympics, it introduced the infamous Nuremberg Laws prohibiting marriage between Jews and non-Jewish Germans, and limiting German citizenship to individuals with two or fewer Jewish grandparents. Stripping German Jews of their historic rights did not go unnoticed at home or abroad but neither did it appear to affect Adolf Hitler’s carefully choreographed opening of the 1936 Games. Two years after hosting the Games, Nazi Germany would annex Austria. One year later, in September 1939, it would invade Poland, setting alight the inferno that was World War II.
German Jews were, in predictable fashion, barred by the Nazis from competing in the Berlin Games. For Hitler, the Olympics presented an opportunity to showcase both Germany’s economic recovery from the Great Depression and the presumed supremacy of its Aryan bloodlines. As Richard Menkis and Harold Troper note in in their book More Than Just Games: Canada and the 1936 Olympics, the spectacle provided the Nazis with a perfect opportunity to showcase “German vitality and organizational experience.” In the end, Berlin hosted athletic delegations from 49 nations—more than any prior Olympics—with Afghanistan, Costa Rica, Bermuda, Bolivia, and Liechtenstein participating for the first time.
When the 1936 Games were awarded to Germany by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1931, the country was still functioning, albeit with declining popular support, as the Weimar Republic. Hitler’s consolidation of dictatorial power did not occur until January 1933, when Germany was recast as the Third Reich.
As soon as Germany’s turn to authoritarianism was an accomplished fact, the fate of the 1936 Olympics might well have been sealed, destined for mass boycott or even cancellation. At the time, however, as is so often the case with Olympic politics, the issue proved agonizingly complicated and ultimately intractable. The Nazis’ persecution of Jews was criticized in some quarters, but this did not discourage Hitler from exploiting the lead-up to the Games to showcase the might and superiority of Aryan Germans. As historian James Pitsula has argued, the Nazi leader believed that the Olympics held great symbolic meaning, resonating with what he called “an unbroken blood bond” between the ancient Greeks and modern-day Germans.
As the Summer Games loomed, the Nazi regime faced intense international scrutiny. Boycott efforts were launched in Canada, the United States, Great Britain, France, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, Turkey, and Spain. In the Spanish city of Barcelona, an alternative “People’s Olympiad” was planned for 1936. Many individual athletes who wished to boycott the Berlin Olympics planned on attending the alternative Games. Owing to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, however, it never took place. Typical of the world’s waning enthusiasm for any sort of common-front boycott was the U.S. Olympic organizer (and later IOC President) Avery Brundage, who initially considered moving the Games out of Germany but ultimately took the position merely that Jewish athletes should be treated fairly at Berlin.
Others were not so accommodating. In Canada and the United States, robust debates arose concerning whether or not it was morally legitimate to participate in Hitler’s Games. Writing in the Jewish Review in 1936, A.B. Bennett of the Canadian Jewish Congress argued that Canadian participation in Berlin suggested that “sportdom had its own laws and principles of right and wrong,” distinct from what goes on in the rest of the world. Canadians “of a nobler stamp” who opposed their country’s participation at Berlin demonstrated that they were devoted to the cause of humanity and the pursuit of higher values in life, Bennett asserted. Eventually, even in the face of significant pockets of public protest, Canada fell in behind the emergent international consensus and decided to participate.
As the Games approached, Hitler decreed that Jewish and black athletes would be prohibited from competing for Nazi Germany. In the end, however, he allowed a single Jewish woman to compete—the barest of concessions to international pressure, arguably, but nonetheless one that compromised his vision of a “Jew-free” German Olympic team.
Despite foreign countries’ controversial decision to participate in the 1936 Games, politics were not left at the door. Participating athletes, spectators and news outlets were not afraid to contest Hitler’s prejudicial symbolism with symbolism of their own. The best-known example, of course, is that of Jesse Owens, an African-American track athlete who became the most-decorated Olympian of the Berlin Games. Owens won four gold medals in sprint and long jump events. Competing directly against German athletes, this talented athlete from America showed the world that Hitler’s “race” thinking was specious and also that black athletes could rise against all odds to become world champions. Owens’ symbolic repudiation of Nazi ideology—both on and off the track—was rendered even sweeter when Hitler condescended to shake his hand and salute him.
Many opponents of a boycott of the 1936 Games believed, incorrectly as it turned out, that granting Hitler an opportunity to showcase his claims of Aryan supremacy in competitive sport might temper the Nazis’ increasingly brazen geo-political ambitions. Others hoped that the persecution of Jews might be relaxed if the Nazis had to host the Games under intense gaze of the international press.
One Canadian who harboured no illusions about appeasing Hitler was Canadian Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath. As Nazi militarism escalated in the late 1930s, Eisendrath lamented that the Berlin Games stood as “the first faint shadow of twilight presaging the deep, dark blackness of a seemingly endless night to come.” The idea that participation in the Berlin Games might improve conditions for German Jews was within months exposed as a cruel fantasy, as conditions became unimaginably worse for Hitler’s victims in Germany and, later, throughout Europe.
Rabbi Eisendrath proved correct in his assessment. Berlin 1936 did indeed prove to be a mere prelude for the dark night to come. In retrospect, it seems highly unlikely that an international boycott of Berlin 1936 would have altered to any substantive degree Hitler’s then-secret plans for war and genocide.
What is beyond question is that the 1936 Berlin Games posed an agonizing moral dilemma for nations and individuals labouring under the near-pervasive sentiment that there was no evil worse than war.